The elastic heart
of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained
shape long at a time. What if he turned his back,
now, and disappeared mysteriously? What if he
went away
— ever so far away, into unknown countries beyond
the seas…?
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Grabbing a photo with a
cell-phone camera. (Photo by "L-ines" on
Flickr website.)

BERKELEY — If Tom Sawyer were a
kid today, he might "disappear
mysteriously" not into a Missouri cave but behind
the door of his bedroom — there to explore
a virtual world with his avatar, write on a friend's
Facebook wall, record the dance steps to his hip-hop
track and upload them to YouTube, or create
a Harry Potter podcast. A new generation of "Web
2.0" tools
has transformed kids' ability to socialize, play,
create, and widely disseminate their productions — and
has left many of their elders in the dark.

What are
kids doing online? How are they using digital
media? And what does their use of digital media
mean for schools, families, and civic life? More
than 400 grown-ups, looking for answers to such
questions, turned out April 23 for a public forum
on "New
Media in the Everyday Lives of Youth" held at
Stanford University

The event marked the first public report on a national
research program on "digital youth," as
part of a $50 million John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation initiative. Researchers presented several case studies on "the
first generation to truly grow up digital," in
the words of Mimi Ito, a University of Southern California
cultural anthropologist and a lead investigator on
the Digital
Youth Project. "This is
perhaps the largest ethnographic study in this area," she
said, "and what we believe is likely to be the
seminal study of young people's participation in
digital media."

Online socializing, media-rich homes,
hiphop music makers

UC Berkeley researcher danah
boyd (her spelling), like other forum participants,
eschewed the hand wringing that often accompanies
adult discussions of young people's use of new media. "Teens
do not have as much access to physical space
as they once did," she
noted. Because they're overscheduled, or are dependent
on adults to drive them places, or their parents
are afraid for their safety, or their friends can't
go out, "online is more easy and accessible,
even when they're stuck at home."

Typical conversation on Facebook 'wall':

'yo, whaz up?'
'not much. how you?' 'good'

Translation:

'I'm
thinking of you and want validation that we're still friends
and you're still thinking of me.'

'Yes of course I am,
silly, and I'll announce it publicly.'

— dana boyd
iSchool Ph.D. student

A doctoral candidate at the UC Berkeley School of
Information (the iSchool) and a blogger on
new media, boyd crisscrossed the nation to interview
and observe teenagers regarding their participation
in sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube.
She also visited thousands of pages on these social-networking
sites, where youth carry on conversations such as "yo,
whaz up?" "not much. how you?" "good.'" Translation: "I'm
thinking of you and want validation, that we're still
friends and you're still thinking of me." "Yes
of course I am, silly, and I'll announce it publicly.'"

Adults
may read these interactions as pointless. For teens, boyd asserted, they're a way of affirming friendships.
And while "hanging
out" online gets a bad
rap with some parents, boyd said this unstructured
time has value for teens — as "social
and emotional down time" and a place for them
to "make
sense of social norms and peer relations."

Sociocultural anthropologist Heather Horst reported
on studies of how new media and technology impact
the family — her own ethnographic study of
professional families in Silicon Valley, and fellow
researchers' work in the Sierra foothills, the East
Bay suburbs, central Los Angeles, and other settings.
By way of these wide-ranging ethnographic studies,
she said, researchers were able to observe cultural
shifts in the organization of domestic space — including
a trend toward media-rich bedrooms
— as well as the way in which families use
and share media. "Families of all incomes and
class levels live in media rich worlds," said
Horst, a postdoc
at UC Berkeley's Institute for the Study of Social
Change and coauthor of a book on cell phone use
in Jamaica.

Dilan Mahendran, an
iSchool Ph.D. candidate interested in the intersection
of race and technology, shared reflections —
illustrated with video clips of the virtuoso female
rapper "Mistreat" — on
his two-year ethnographic research on hiphop
music making in after-school programs in San
Francisco. "Adults
provide these spaces, but kids inhabit them," he
said. New technologies make it easier for young people
to sample, mix, record, and distribute hiphop music,
using it to ask the questions "Who
am I? What can I know? What should I do? What can
I hope for?" said Mahendran.

Interest-driven networked communities

Grassroots
hiphop artists often become part of what have been
called "interest-driven" online communities
— where, Ito said, "marginal" teens are able to find
likeminded peers or to achieve proficiency or status
without being labeled a "dork." Gay
teens are among those who seek out such online
communities, she noted. So do teens with serious
passions, be they Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans or
Japanese anime fan subbers, who translate and subtitle
foreign films for fellow enthusiasts.

The forum showcased just a handful
of the 22 case studies funded through the Digital
Youth Project. Berkeley DYP researchers have also
investigated, among other topics, pro-anorexia
and pro-bulimia online discussion groups, collaborative
storytelling among fifth graders, teaching and learning
with multimedia tools, teenagers' use of video games
in a cyber cafe setting, and digital photography
diaries of kids entering middle school. The scholars
plan to do shared analysis of their findings for
a report to be released later this year.

"New Media in the Everyday Lives of Youth"
was presented by the San Francisco-based non-profit Common
Sense Media and the MacArthur
Foundation.
If you missed the live simulcast on Second Life,
a webcast of the forum will be available in the near
future on each organization's website.